Content Deployment and Editorial Preview/Workflow

I am evaluating Orchard as a potential CMS for a rewrite of a very large and popular site and I am loving the Orchard technical design and overall approach so far. I am at earlier stages of evaluation so I will have a few questions to ask.

Site will be powered by 3 geographically dispersed datacenters with 15+ members editorial team constantly pushing content to live environment. Therefore editors will need automated means of pushing the content from their staging environment into
live servers (each running SQL Server clusters). What is the prefered approach that you guys can recommend or already implemented for this? Would you recommend replicating filtered data from staging to live using SQL Server replication?

The closest discussion I could find about Workflows is http://orchard.codeplex.com/discussions/241520. May I enquire about the current status of this?

Editorial team will need to preview the changes they made before publishing them. As far as I can see the only way to do that currently is to publish the content and view content directly on the site - I have installed the "Version Manager" module
to get preview functionality for draft content but widget layers are not displayed in preview mode (because widget URL rules don't match with the preview URL structure). Without workflow (and one stage in between draft and published), content that is approved+published
might get deployed together with content that is published for reviews, etc as both of them are seen as "published" by the system. What is your recomendation to solve this problem?

Sorry for the delay in answering this. SQL Server replication would work but it's fairly heavy-handed and monolithic. We are clearly in need of a good module for granular content deployment between modules. The good news is that we probably have most of
the pieces of the puzzle already in place. In particular, we have an import/export feature that presents a well-defined way to move content around, that should be appropriate to content deployment. The new rules engine in 1.3 (due end of this month) could
also help you set-up a workflow that would trigger such deployments. What's missing is the plumbing around it that would move these payloads around.

Let me know if I can help further. This is something that is clearly a generic need, and I'd like to see it addressed.

I agree with Bertrand. In a previous project, we implemented module (metadata) transfers using real workflows (.net workflow foundation) across 6 different production datacenters ( and staging environments) and the design worked cleanly. It is not clear
how the rules engine workflow will work yet (compared to .Net WF), we are currently looking at it to solve similar issues. Can't wait for the 1.3 release.